Law's Power, the Sexed Body, and Feminist Discourse

Abstract

In this paper I shall explore a key problem facing feminist legal scholarship. This problem concerns the nature and validity of knowledge, and it is an issue which is being widely debated throughout feminist scholarship.1 Many of us who work as feminist scholars can be said to be facing a period of intense uncertainty where taken-for-granted assumptions about knowledge and about the relationship between knowledge and politics no longer hold. For example, the comfortable correlation between theory and practice where one justified the other now seems unreliable, Moreover, there is uncertainty as to what 'correct' politics are, and the well-founded criticisms by working-class and black women that feminism (as currently constituted?) does not speak for or to them, has shattered a naive confidence in an emotionally based sisterhood. In intellectual work the challenge to the commonality of womanhood has undermined the assumption that empirical enquiries into 'women's experience' would reveal the epistemological failings of malestream social science.2 This is not just because women's experiences are so varied but because we have come to recognize that challenging men's truth with women's truth may have political purchase but it leaves us on shaky ground when truth itself is no longer an absolute outside the fray to which we can appeal.3 If feminism cannot speak for or to all women; if it engages with the traditional epistemologies only to find that postmodern and poststructuralist thought has moved the goal posts; if it can no longer respond to intellectual problems with political answers4 then it is time to try to reformulate the problematic that feminism addresses and to re-evaluate taken-for-granted feminist truths and practices. This is, of course, much easier said than done. We need, for example, to transcend the all too familiar practice of categorizing feminism into radical, socialist, cultural, and liberal feminisms because these conceptual straitjackets now conceal more than they reveal.5 We need to abandon the craving for a meta-narrative which will (at last) explain the oppressions and subjectivities of race, class, and gender. And, if we are to give up certain orthodoxies, we need to consider from what position(s) we can continue to speak out against those oppressions and to give voice to our subjectivities. If we argue that the